Saturday, March 12, 2011

Installation piece made for ROSE LAVE PLUS BLANC in Ivry/Seine, France, 1996. The white piece is a reference to Lot's Wife, the vial is a sample of the Dead Sea in Israel, the bucket is well, just a bucket.

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

ADVENTURES IN A BOX has launched. The limited edition set of 24 prints, objects, drawings and collage works by Matthew Rose and Fritz Sauter. The image above, Invincible, is an original collage and was created to serve as the cover for the edition, ADVENTURES IN A BOX.

Bound to a desk in front of a computer screen is no doubt the formatting of new perspectives and outlooks, not always ideal but certainly explorations in varying directions. No longer confined to location what is quite heartening is the connections and networks that grow from chance encounters via the web. Work, ideas and output have a more open ideological middle ground, once its live it is in every sense out there, for interpretation, discussion, review and optimistically for growth and experimentation. Swiss artist Fritz Sauter came across the work of Matthew Rose (France) via various online media/gallery profiles, Red Fox Press, Facebook, Blogs and in particular a project by Rose, A Book About Death.

Mutual communication and image sharing of related ideas eventually spurred a trip from Paris to Schaffhausen in January 2011 to work free style in Fritz’s letter press studio and their combined abilities morphed into “Adventures in a Box,” a collaborative book project.

The box: powerful, magical and convenient. It is where jewels are kept and loved ones buried. Solid or flimsy, the box is the willing partner to most anything: Old letters, old clothes, cash, trash, ash. Our boxes shift shape and purpose: A suitcase, a briefcase, a cigarette case. Sealed by tape or string or the gravity of its cover, like a heart, the box beats out a certain secret. A gift. A poisoned gift.
That’s the wide-eyed premise of Adventures in a Box, a collaborative spiriting down the rabbit hole by Swiss-German and letterpress Kunstler Fritz Sauter, and Paris based American dadaist Matthew Rose. Like Alice through the looking glass, Adventures – in printed works and altered objects – are voyages of the mind: Trips that scribble backwards and upside down via letterpress; here text and image amuses, perplexes, maps out and reaches out.

Beginning with dozens of 36×36 cm cardboard boxes, purchased by Fritz from a local monopac-factory and a varied collection of cast off supplies from the local Salvation Army, the initial suggested to fill the boxes was the start of the “Adventure”. In a limited edition of 24, more than two dozen individual works in collage, letterpress, drawing, rubber stamp, altered objects and even buttons found are packaged like a massive Dagwood sandwich, multi-layered with each piece a chapter in a trip through death, love, drunkenness, God, Disney, pin-ups and the meaning of political discourse in a world gone akimbo. Stealing the flame from Duchamp’s Boite en Valise, the Frenchman’s “portable exhibition” of his significant works and ready mades, Adventures, is essentially a complete and ready-made exhibition in a box.

Once in the studio, which overlooked the Rhine, it was a mad rush of cutting and pasting and pulling type from an immense collection. “Fritz would ink up the press and we’d roll right through the day.” explains Rose. “The collaboration was intensive” says Fritz, “we discussed every aspect seriously – sometimes we found a way to make the works, sometimes we didn’t. We argued about translations, design, colours, paper, it was like a marriage! But in art, I prefer to work in ways where meaning is different for people. Agreement was not the goal, conversation was the goal and in the end, the adventure.”

A gold record featuring ‘Fritz Sauter sings Vivaldi offers the B side of ‘Mathew Rose complains about Swiss food’. Another work is a simple button exhorting you to: FRAGEN SIE IHER KUNSTLER(ASK YOUR ARTIST). Fritz also created a series of abstract drawings in crayon, and rubber stamps for each box. Meanwhile Matthew spent one afternoon composing 25 of his unique collages using American pin ups, medical illustrations and bits of magazine ads from the 1950s. Political posters in wooden type- “FUCK YOU AND YOUR POLITICS” – were paired with cold type text bitching about Western societies: “THE SWISS ARE PERFECT”

“We filled the ‘Schachtel’ (box) with almost every idea we had during the four days in Switzerland,” says Fritz. ” You can take each piece in your hands and examine it. The art is intimate, but it’s also quite a surprise. So many different ideas, but I can hear (and see) them all talking to each other. Its like a guide to some strange place!”

The limited edition work is dedicated to the French artist Jean-Paul Chagniot (1951-2011), who died just as the project was launched. Two boxes are already in the art collection of the city of Schaffhausen, Switzerland. The works are available direct from each artist.

Friday, March 4, 2011

Gestalten, the German art book publisher, just released Cutting Edges: Contemporary Collage, edited by artist/curator James Gallagher. I'm pleased to be included this new volume. My work can be seen on pages 178 - 183. There are about 300 full-color pages; hard cover.

"Cutting Edges documents the new heyday of collage in current art and visual culture. Today’s artists, illustrators, and designers are increasingly drawn to this artistic technique by the challenges of seamlessly melding traditional craftsmanship with skilled computer montage. They are not only composing a wide variety of visual elements, but are also deliberately omitting, deleting, and destroying them. This book is an inspiring collection of these unique examples of contemporary collage."

Above: Alone, 2009, collage on paper from the series, Days Like These. Cutting Edges book cover.